Radical Pedagogies surveys experiments in architectural education from the 1960s and 1970s. Broadly, it was in these decades that the responsibility of the architect and the role of the building were made problematic and when the participatory status of previously excluded social groups was crucially being reimagined. As a consequence, the techniques and theoretical frameworks used to analyse and teach architecture were in urgent need of radical change.
Following the etymological line of ‘radical’ to ‘radix’, Radical Pedagogies defines what is radical as something that questions the ‘roots’ of disciplinary foundations (p. 11). As such, at its core, what is considered to be radical is anything that disturbs rather than reinforces. The disturbance of the status quo is the necessity and arguable urgency of this book that comes at a time when the experiments in architectural education in the second half of the twentieth century are generally absent, unnoticed or forgotten in contemporary education. As such, this book is engaged in a timely call to action. As a reaction against the lacking courage of contemporary institutes, it seems that Radical Pedagogies is returning to architecture’s history to revive interest in diverse pedagogical experiments.
Stepping back to see the broader portfolio of research that Radical Pedagogies contributes to, it is clear that this book is itself an experiment in radical pedagogy. It is a collaborative project that started in 2010 as a series of PhD seminars at Princeton University led by architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina. Each articulation of the project, such as in symposia, essays, lectures, exhibitions and, of course, this book, have been dependent on collaboration, non-hierarchical discourses and open socially-engaged interactivity. For instance, whilst the book has been edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister, the deep archival research that makes up the content for the book relies on the efforts of over one hundred contributors from around the world; this is bottom-up collective research almost to the degree of being crowd-sourced.
Focusing briefly on the exhibitions, Radical Pedagogies was first exhibited at the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale Close, Closer in 2013, then at the fourteenth International Architecture Exhibition Fundamentals at the Venice Architecture Biennale directed by Rem Koolhaas in 2014, and at the seventh Warsaw Under Construction festival organised by the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2015. These public works, which exhibit the themes and lay bare the raw materials of Radical Pedagogies, are inclusive at their foundations because they are dependent on collaborative research and audience participation. In line with this, it is clear in the presentation of Radical Pedagogies that there is little stock put in fixing, exhausting or stabilising the radical events that make up architecture’s past. That is to say, despite its ambitious scale, this book is not attempting to be the last word on the subject. As claimed in the introduction, the historical effects of these radical pedagogical practices are still ‘haunting’ the conversations we have today (p. 11). Radical Pedagogies uses the works it gathers as tinder to stoke more of those conversations.
The broad aim of the Radical Pedagogies enterprise, of which this book is only one of its facets, seems to be about developing new pedagogical practices that mobilise students to be more socially dynamic in their research projects. The unique way this has been pursued is almost an inversion of the well known research projects by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In which, collaborative studio practices between lecturers and students are turned into research through critical field experiments that develop into a book of new theories of analysis for architecture. Instead, in this book, academic research is primarily treated as a studio project and therefore as the source for collaboration. In this way, research itself is taken seriously as an act of design. As such, this book is a contribution to, and unsettling of, the ways in which architecture’s body of knowledge is developed and evaluated.
The book is made up of fourteen chapters, although the thematic differences between those chapters are not exactly clean cut. Even the presentation of their divisions in Studio Christopher Victor’s graphic and editorial designs are appropriately understated. They are modest, monochrome red, full bleed images that striate the fore edge of the book; they work more like subtle points of modulation rather than definite terminals. With brevity, but close attention to detail, each chapter gives prismatic insights into a series of moments in architecture’s radical past. Every section is generously illustrated with primary sources of archival photographs, diagrams, sketches, pamphlets, short-lived models and artworks. These images work well to bring the reader up close to the classroom, the studio, the street, the office where these moments of radical eruption occurred. They make the vitality behind these heterogeneous events tangible at a lively, visceral level. In a way, some of the chapters read like candid recordings of a Kaprow-like ‘Happening’ more than taxonomizing documents of architecture's radical past.
There are the familiar examples of Paris May ‘68 (pp. 22-24), Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm (pp. 121-125), Black Mountain College (pp. 52-53), AA London (pp. 183-185), and so on. But there are also less familiar cases, such as Eames in India (pp. 272-274), the Latin American Schools (pp. 154-159) and the F+F School for Experimental Design, Zurich (pp. 374-378). Radical Pedagogies shows the ways in which these emergent adversarial discourses turned away from the established ideal of the discrete building to focus instead on the often unanticipated, wilder goings-on of architects and the built environment. Crucially, these instances of radical education are not treated as distant historical relics that have been unearthed and spit shined for this new weighty book. Rather, they are represented as part of the under-acknowledged, living history of contemporary architecture.
This book does well to avoid convenient false characterizations of both a conventionally structured, traditional discipline and its opposing radical counterpart. This is done by amplifying architecture’s multiplicity. By labouring on this, it is shown that there is no evidently fixed, singular order to architecture’s historical or, perhaps most importantly, present condition. Rather, what is explicated in Radical Pedagogies is an unresting, dynamic ecology of architecture. Therefore, the ways that these upending changes are shown to oppose what was established thinking is through a kind of organic, agonistic flux. This means that whilst there is evidently a common turn towards the radical in architectural education at the end of the twentieth century, there is still an essential difference in that common shift because, as is made clear in the array of examples in this book, there is a vast diversity to architecture’s dissensus. As such, this is why Radical Pedagogies justifiably goes to such lengths to make clear that the nature of what is radical for architecture is contingent rather than essential. For instance, there are vast differences in the challenges to think radically in Mexico at a time when so much activity was being coloured by fears of the Cold War (pp. 44-47). Conversely, during the same period, architects faced different sorts of radical social obligations in Nigeria during the Civil War (pp. 29-30).
With this adversarial diversity in mind, the chapters are organised into loose themes, such as ‘Retooling the Practice’ (p. 352), ‘Subject and Body Matters’ (p. 244) and ‘Beyond the Classroom’ (p. 154). Each chapter is populated with unique cases of radical pedagogical practices that are labelled with respective protagonists, institutes, locations and dates. There are innumerable ways these chapters could have been organised, two alternatives are offered. One is by date, which appeases a more structurally linear interpretation of events, and the other is by longitude, which brings attention to the vast spread of radical pedagogies at a global scale. The way these instances of radical pedagogies have been brought together makes them appear like fragments of clusters of events that are related by the urgency of their radical vision and not by their shared, collective values. As such, what is being surveyed is the emancipatory potential of radical pedagogies in degrees ‘from resistance to reinforcement, from undercover activism to outright political protest’ (p. 16). Presenting variable intensities of the radical in this frank way is a valuable contribution to architecture’s existing body of knowledge. This makes Radical Pedagogies a critical resource for the contemporary student and teacher of architecture.
If the intended audiences for this book are architects, students, and teachers of architecture then they are certainly catered for with lucid writing that surveys a complex, convoluted and exciting series of ruptures in architecture’s history. It feels, however, that the possibility to stoke similar interests and avenues of research in other neighbouring disciplines has been overlooked. It is surprising that a broader post-disciplinary, or debatably transdisciplinary, audience of designers has not been addressed in some way. If the overall aim of the book is to provoke students to be more socially dynamic in their research projects, then perhaps part of the book’s social responsibility could be to goad collaborations with other disciplines that are facing similar challenges to architecture’s current pedagogical rut. Despite that, it is likely Radical Pedagogies will join the gamut of essential writing on education in design to become an invaluable resource for thinking through radical histories to inspire new radical futures.
Following the etymological line of ‘radical’ to ‘radix’, Radical Pedagogies defines what is radical as something that questions the ‘roots’ of disciplinary foundations (p. 11). As such, at its core, what is considered to be radical is anything that disturbs rather than reinforces. The disturbance of the status quo is the necessity and arguable urgency of this book that comes at a time when the experiments in architectural education in the second half of the twentieth century are generally absent, unnoticed or forgotten in contemporary education. As such, this book is engaged in a timely call to action. As a reaction against the lacking courage of contemporary institutes, it seems that Radical Pedagogies is returning to architecture’s history to revive interest in diverse pedagogical experiments.
Stepping back to see the broader portfolio of research that Radical Pedagogies contributes to, it is clear that this book is itself an experiment in radical pedagogy. It is a collaborative project that started in 2010 as a series of PhD seminars at Princeton University led by architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina. Each articulation of the project, such as in symposia, essays, lectures, exhibitions and, of course, this book, have been dependent on collaboration, non-hierarchical discourses and open socially-engaged interactivity. For instance, whilst the book has been edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister, the deep archival research that makes up the content for the book relies on the efforts of over one hundred contributors from around the world; this is bottom-up collective research almost to the degree of being crowd-sourced.
Focusing briefly on the exhibitions, Radical Pedagogies was first exhibited at the third Lisbon Architecture Triennale Close, Closer in 2013, then at the fourteenth International Architecture Exhibition Fundamentals at the Venice Architecture Biennale directed by Rem Koolhaas in 2014, and at the seventh Warsaw Under Construction festival organised by the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2015. These public works, which exhibit the themes and lay bare the raw materials of Radical Pedagogies, are inclusive at their foundations because they are dependent on collaborative research and audience participation. In line with this, it is clear in the presentation of Radical Pedagogies that there is little stock put in fixing, exhausting or stabilising the radical events that make up architecture’s past. That is to say, despite its ambitious scale, this book is not attempting to be the last word on the subject. As claimed in the introduction, the historical effects of these radical pedagogical practices are still ‘haunting’ the conversations we have today (p. 11). Radical Pedagogies uses the works it gathers as tinder to stoke more of those conversations.
The broad aim of the Radical Pedagogies enterprise, of which this book is only one of its facets, seems to be about developing new pedagogical practices that mobilise students to be more socially dynamic in their research projects. The unique way this has been pursued is almost an inversion of the well known research projects by architects Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi. In which, collaborative studio practices between lecturers and students are turned into research through critical field experiments that develop into a book of new theories of analysis for architecture. Instead, in this book, academic research is primarily treated as a studio project and therefore as the source for collaboration. In this way, research itself is taken seriously as an act of design. As such, this book is a contribution to, and unsettling of, the ways in which architecture’s body of knowledge is developed and evaluated.
The book is made up of fourteen chapters, although the thematic differences between those chapters are not exactly clean cut. Even the presentation of their divisions in Studio Christopher Victor’s graphic and editorial designs are appropriately understated. They are modest, monochrome red, full bleed images that striate the fore edge of the book; they work more like subtle points of modulation rather than definite terminals. With brevity, but close attention to detail, each chapter gives prismatic insights into a series of moments in architecture’s radical past. Every section is generously illustrated with primary sources of archival photographs, diagrams, sketches, pamphlets, short-lived models and artworks. These images work well to bring the reader up close to the classroom, the studio, the street, the office where these moments of radical eruption occurred. They make the vitality behind these heterogeneous events tangible at a lively, visceral level. In a way, some of the chapters read like candid recordings of a Kaprow-like ‘Happening’ more than taxonomizing documents of architecture's radical past.
There are the familiar examples of Paris May ‘68 (pp. 22-24), Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm (pp. 121-125), Black Mountain College (pp. 52-53), AA London (pp. 183-185), and so on. But there are also less familiar cases, such as Eames in India (pp. 272-274), the Latin American Schools (pp. 154-159) and the F+F School for Experimental Design, Zurich (pp. 374-378). Radical Pedagogies shows the ways in which these emergent adversarial discourses turned away from the established ideal of the discrete building to focus instead on the often unanticipated, wilder goings-on of architects and the built environment. Crucially, these instances of radical education are not treated as distant historical relics that have been unearthed and spit shined for this new weighty book. Rather, they are represented as part of the under-acknowledged, living history of contemporary architecture.
This book does well to avoid convenient false characterizations of both a conventionally structured, traditional discipline and its opposing radical counterpart. This is done by amplifying architecture’s multiplicity. By labouring on this, it is shown that there is no evidently fixed, singular order to architecture’s historical or, perhaps most importantly, present condition. Rather, what is explicated in Radical Pedagogies is an unresting, dynamic ecology of architecture. Therefore, the ways that these upending changes are shown to oppose what was established thinking is through a kind of organic, agonistic flux. This means that whilst there is evidently a common turn towards the radical in architectural education at the end of the twentieth century, there is still an essential difference in that common shift because, as is made clear in the array of examples in this book, there is a vast diversity to architecture’s dissensus. As such, this is why Radical Pedagogies justifiably goes to such lengths to make clear that the nature of what is radical for architecture is contingent rather than essential. For instance, there are vast differences in the challenges to think radically in Mexico at a time when so much activity was being coloured by fears of the Cold War (pp. 44-47). Conversely, during the same period, architects faced different sorts of radical social obligations in Nigeria during the Civil War (pp. 29-30).
With this adversarial diversity in mind, the chapters are organised into loose themes, such as ‘Retooling the Practice’ (p. 352), ‘Subject and Body Matters’ (p. 244) and ‘Beyond the Classroom’ (p. 154). Each chapter is populated with unique cases of radical pedagogical practices that are labelled with respective protagonists, institutes, locations and dates. There are innumerable ways these chapters could have been organised, two alternatives are offered. One is by date, which appeases a more structurally linear interpretation of events, and the other is by longitude, which brings attention to the vast spread of radical pedagogies at a global scale. The way these instances of radical pedagogies have been brought together makes them appear like fragments of clusters of events that are related by the urgency of their radical vision and not by their shared, collective values. As such, what is being surveyed is the emancipatory potential of radical pedagogies in degrees ‘from resistance to reinforcement, from undercover activism to outright political protest’ (p. 16). Presenting variable intensities of the radical in this frank way is a valuable contribution to architecture’s existing body of knowledge. This makes Radical Pedagogies a critical resource for the contemporary student and teacher of architecture.
If the intended audiences for this book are architects, students, and teachers of architecture then they are certainly catered for with lucid writing that surveys a complex, convoluted and exciting series of ruptures in architecture’s history. It feels, however, that the possibility to stoke similar interests and avenues of research in other neighbouring disciplines has been overlooked. It is surprising that a broader post-disciplinary, or debatably transdisciplinary, audience of designers has not been addressed in some way. If the overall aim of the book is to provoke students to be more socially dynamic in their research projects, then perhaps part of the book’s social responsibility could be to goad collaborations with other disciplines that are facing similar challenges to architecture’s current pedagogical rut. Despite that, it is likely Radical Pedagogies will join the gamut of essential writing on education in design to become an invaluable resource for thinking through radical histories to inspire new radical futures.
Read the full review at Journal of Design History.